Markus led the procession through his lands towards the flat-topped hill where the Menogoth heroes of old were buried. Called the Morrdunn, its height should have made it the natural place to build one of the forts that gave the Menogoths their name of hill people, but the first tribesmen to settle here had instinctively known that this was not a place for the living. A number of torches flickered at its summit as the grim procession wound its way up the hard-packed earth of its burial paths.
They passed the tomb of Devyn of the Axe, the heroic warrior who had saved the first king of the tribe from an ogre’s cook pot. Further up, Markus nodded respectfully to the mausoleum carved into the hill where Bannan, the greatest Swordmaster of the Menogoths, lay at his final rest. Odel the Mad lay within a simple sepulchre of polished grey granite built into the upper slopes of the hill, and Markus touched the talisman of Ranald at his chest to ward off the malign influence of the berserk huscarl.
He rode onto the crest of the hill, its summit enclosed by a ring of rune-carved stones like spikes on an ancient ruler’s crown. The priests of Morr were waiting, a dozen men in black robes tied with silver cords and each carrying a thin book bound in soft kidskin. The black coach rumbled onto the hilltop, and the Bloodspears moved to the centre of the hill, where the only priest of Morr with his hood drawn back stood ready to fulfil his duty to the dead.
‘Who comes with a lost soul to be ushered into the realm of Morr?’ intoned the priest.
Markus and his champion dismounted, walking alongside the Bloodspears towards the centre of the hilltop tomb. Wenian planted the banner before the priest as Markus answered.
‘I do, Markus Gothii, King of the Menogoths.’
Markus used his old title, for this was an ancient rite of his tribe, one in which his new title of count had no part.
‘Morr would know this soul’s name, King Markus of the Menogoths.’
‘I bring my son, Vartan Gothii, slain by greenskin warriors while defending his people.’
‘Slain in service of a higher calling,’ said the priest. ‘Then he will find rest in the realms beyond this world of flesh.’
Markus clenched his jaw. He was the master of the Menogoths, a warrior of superlative skill. He rubbed a hand across his shaven scalp, tensing his lean, wolfish physique as the grief threatened to unman him before the priests who would see his son to the realms of the dead.
The priest saw his battle and opened the book he carried as the Bloodspears gently lowered Vartan Gothii to the ground. The acolytes of the head priest came forward and knelt in a circle around the body. Markus looked at the unmoving features of his son, so pale and serene that they might have been carved from marble.
‘Keep it simple, priest,’ ordered Markus. ‘Vartan hated ceremony.’
‘As you wish, King Markus,’ said the priest, flipping to a shorter passage.
Markus’s wife and daughter came alongside him and he took their hands as the priest began his recitation of the benediction to the dead. The priest’s voice was clear and strong as he read, and Markus took comfort in the words he heard.
‘Great Morr, master of the dead and dreams, you have made death itself the gateway to eternal life. Look with love on our fallen brother, and make him one with your realm that he may come before you free from pain. Lord Morr, the death of Vartan Gothii recalls our human condition and the brevity of our lives in this world. For those who believe, death is not the end, nor does it destroy the bonds forged in our lives. We share the faith of all men and the hope of the life beyond this frail realm of all flesh. Bring the light of your wisdom to this time of testing and pain as we pray for Vartan Gothii and for those who loved him.’
The priest closed his book and bowed his head. The hillside was silent, even the black horses and the torches seeming to understand that it would be unseemly to intrude on a king’s mourning.
A slow clapping came from the far side of the hill, and a figure armoured in gleaming silver and gold emerged from behind one of the great menhirs. A mantle of white silk spilled from his shoulders, contrasting sharply with the soft caramel colour of his skin and the oiled darkness of his lustrous hair.
‘Very poetic,’ said the warrior, his accent soft, rounded and obviously cultured, though it was of no tribe Markus had ever encountered. ‘You mortals do so enjoy indulging in the luxury of woe.’
‘Begone,’ declared the priest of Morr, brandishing his prayer book like a weapon. ‘This is a sacred moment you are defiling.’
The warrior snatched the book from the priest and hurled it into the darkness. ‘This? Utter nonsense! Don’t believe a word of it, but what can you expect from a man who has not passed over to see the other side for himself?’
The Bloodspears lifted their weapons and the swordsmen tensed as the warrior walked slowly towards the mourners at the centre of the Morrdunn. His movements were unhurried and casual, yet Markus’s expert eye caught the telltale signs of a man perfectly in balance with his body. This man was a killer, no doubt about that. He seemed utterly unafraid, which marked him either as a madman or a man who knew something Markus did not.
‘Who are you?’ he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. ‘I am burying my son, and you are being disrespectful. That can get a man killed in these lands.’
‘So can being in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said the warrior. ‘But in answer to your question, I am Khaled al-Muntasir, though I am sure that will mean nothing to you.’
‘You’re right, it doesn’t,’ said Markus. ‘Now begone before I have you slain.’
Khaled al-Muntasir laughed, a rich sound full of dark amusement. He smiled and swept back his cloak to reveal a slender-bladed scabbard of pale wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl and jade. The warrior placed his hand on the sword and drummed his fingers on the pommel of jet.
‘If you are looking for a fight, then you are a fool,’ said Markus.
‘I am many things, Count Markus: a man of culture, an artist, a writer of sorts and a dilettante in all things mystical. I have some knowledge of the celestial mechanics wheeling above us and am a passable tailor, weaponsmith and crafter of fine jewellery and ornaments. But one thing I am not, is a fool.’
‘Let me gut him, my lord,’ hissed Wenian, drawing his sword with a hiss of metal on leather.
Markus hesitated, knowing full well how skilful Wenian was, but fearing that any duel fought here would be an unequal match.
‘Yes, let him,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir, drawing his own weapon. The blade reflected Mannslieb’s glow such that it shone like a sliver of moonlight itself. ‘I have been cooped up too long in Athel Tamera, and it will be good to wet my blade in mortal flesh again.’
‘You talk big, fancy man, but you’ll bleed just the same,’ said Wenian, spinning his sword to loosen his shoulders.
‘Actually, I think you’ll find that–’
Wenian didn’t give him a chance to finish, launching himself at the finery-clad warrior. Khaled al-Muntasir’s blade swept up in a blur of white gold, flickering like sunlight on ice. Wenian’s charge carried him past the warrior, but before he turned, he sank to his knees and toppled to the side. His head fell from his shoulders, rolling to a halt before one of the great menhirs.
Markus was horrified. Wenian was one of the greatest swordsmen he knew, more skilful than any droyaska of the Ostagoths, and twice as fast as any Cherusen Wildman. Yet this effete warrior had beheaded him without so much as batting an eyelid.
Khaled al-Muntasir knelt beside Wenian’s corpse and wiped his sword blade clean of blood. He looked up at Markus with a predatory gleam in his eyes. They were dark and liquid, like the oil that burned in sunken pools deep in the reeking canyons of the Grey Mountains, and he found it hard to look away. Markus had seen that kind of look before, in the eyes of a wolf with its prey firmly locked in its grip.
‘What are you?’ he said.
Khaled al-Muntasir stood and smiled. ‘I am your worst nightmare. Or at least one of them.’
‘Kill him,’ ordered Markus, and the Bloodspears moved to surround this lone warrior. No one, no matter how skilful could survive against such numbers. Fifty spearmen advanced towards the warrior, the iron blades of their weapons aimed at the swordsman’s heart.
‘Really?’ said Khaled al-Muntasir, as though disappointed. ‘You are a king, are you not? This is the best you can do? I’m insulted you think I would fight like some common brawler. Luckily, Krell here excels at this sort of fight.’
A terrifying roar swept over the summit of Morrdunn, the echoes bouncing from the menhirs and filling every heart that heard it with the naked fear common to all prey creatures. Something moved in the shadows and a hulking red shape flew through the air to land with a crash of metal and stone in the centre of the ring of spearmen.
It was a warrior, but a warrior unlike any other.
A full head and shoulders above his tallest rival, Krell was clad in brazen plates of ancient iron so stained with blood that their original colour was impossible to gauge. A great skull rune was stamped or branded into his chest, and Markus’s courage deserted him at the sight of it. Great horns of bone extended from the monstrous warrior’s helm and Markus saw Krell’s face was a skeletal horror of yellowed bone and leathery flesh. A hideous emerald glow burned in his empty eye sockets, and any warrior brave enough to meet his gaze saw the manner of his death there.
A vast axe with a blade of utter darkness swung out and a dozen men died, their bodies hurled through the air like corn stalks at threshing time. The red-armoured warrior bludgeoned its way through the Bloodspears, hacking them down with insane ferocity and without mercy. Khaled al-Muntasir watched the slaughter impassively, as though bored by such violence.
In seconds, every warrior of the Bloodspears was dead, chopped into ragged hunks of gory meat. It was impossible to tell one warrior’s remains from another, such was the scale of butchery. Markus ran to his wife and daughter, gathering them to him and shielding them from the whirlwind of destruction that killed his warriors.
The sword bands fared no better; cut down in a frenzy of bloodletting that left Markus horrified and disbelieving. The summit of the Morrdunn was soaked in blood, the ground sodden with the vital fluid of a hundred men, slain in less time that it would take to count them. The slaughterman returned to Khaled al-Muntasir’s side, a constant stream of blood pouring from the black blade of his axe.
Only now did the swordsman look interested in the slaughter. A thin network of veins pulsed beneath the skin of his temples, his jaw clenched and his nostrils flared at the bitter reek of blood on the air.
‘Ulric preserve us,’ whispered Markus, backing away from the two warriors.
‘The wolf god?’ smiled Khaled al-Muntasir. ‘He won’t hear you. And if he does, he won’t care. Isn’t that what his priests teach, that his followers should be self-reliant?’
‘You are daemons,’ said Markus, drawing his sword and standing before his family. ‘Fight me if you must, but let my wife and daughter live. They are innocents and do not deserve this.’
‘Innocent?’ hissed Khaled al-Muntasir, as though enjoying the taste of the word. ‘There is no such thing in this world. Just by being born mankind corrupts this world. Every step a mortal takes, he destroys a little piece of it. No, do not think to appeal to me with thoughts of compassion. I forgot that emotion before your tribe even crossed the eastern mountains.’
‘What are you?’ demanded Markus.
Khaled al-Muntasir stepped closer, and Markus saw that the pale hue of his complexion had nothing to do with the moonlight. Khaled al-Muntasir smiled, revealing two elongated fangs descending from his upper jaw.
‘You are a blood drinker!’ hissed Markus. ‘A creature of the dead.’
‘I cannot deny the truth,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir. ‘And your daughter’s terror is such a tantalising sweetmeat that I think I shall leave her until last. As much as it would give me great pleasure to make you watch them die, I will savour her terror all the more as she watches her parents bled dry before her young eyes.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ said Markus, fighting to control his terror of this beast of the night. His blood was sluggish in his veins, and it was all he could do to keep hold of his sword.
‘It is not I,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir. ‘I am but a humble servant in this drama.’
A vast shadow moved in the darkness behind the warrior, a slice of the deepest, darkest night given form and motion. As Krell towered over Khaled al-Muntasir, so too did this giant figure loom over them all. It stepped into the flickering circle of light cast by the fallen torches, yet no hint of illumination touched its blackened form.
A mighty figure cloaked in night and armour from the darkest forges of the damned, its eyes burned with the same green light as shimmered in Krell’s vacant skull. One arm clutched a forked staff in the form of an elongated snake while the other had a sickly metallic sheen to it, like iron with a rainbow scum of oil slithering across its surface.
Grotesque and twisted with vile animation, the grim visage was that of death itself, a horror cast from the nightmares of men and women since the dawn of time. Markus’s wife fainted dead away with horror, and he felt his own fragile grip on sanity slipping in the face of such irrevocable knowledge of his own death. His sword fell to the ground and tears spilled from his eyes as he turned his daughter’s face away from the monster.
She sobbed uncontrollably, and Markus knew it would be a mercy to cut her throat rather than have her face what was to come. Until this moment, Markus had not feared death, knowing his courage in battle would surely earn him a place in Ulric’s Hall. One look into the lambent pits of this horror’s eyes told him there would be no journey to the next life to hunt in the forests of eternal winter. Even the horror of the grave, with cold earth embracing his rotting flesh and the worms growing fat on his meat was to be denied him. Compared to the fate this creature was soon to visit upon them, such an end would be a mercy.
Markus dropped to his knees before this dreadful apparition as it closed on him.
‘It is fitting that you give homage to the new lord of these lands,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir.
Markus fumbled for his dagger, thinking to end his and his family’s life, but before his hand even closed on the hilt, the blood drinker was at his side and holding him in an unbreakable grip, the cold flesh of his face inches from his own.
‘No, not yet,’ whispered Khaled al-Muntasir. ‘Not when there are such sights left to see.’
Darkness boiled from the towering black warrior’s form, filling the sky with unnatural gloom, blotting out the moon and filling the sky with evil clouds and the screeching of bats. Wolves howled in the darkness, blood-hungry beasts of the deep forest, not the noble creatures of the northern woods that carried the chill winds of Ulric in their veins. The darkness closed on Hyrstdunn, obscuring it from view, but Markus heard the screams and knew his city was doomed.
‘I want you to say his name,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir.
‘I don’t know it,’ said Markus, wishing that were true.
‘Come now,’ chided Khaled al-Muntasir, digging a manicured nail into his throat. ‘It lives in mortal minds as a nightmare of distant lands and forgotten days. It is a name of death that travels with fearful taletellers and poisons the lips of scared men huddled around fires in the foolish belief that they are safe from his reach. Say it, mortal. Say it now.’
‘No,’ wept Markus. ‘I cannot.’
‘Of course you can, it’s just wind noises passing through your throat.’
‘He is… he is…’
‘That’s it, go on,’ urged the blood drinker.
‘He is Nagash,’ said Markus, spitting the name like a curse.
As though giving voice to the name of the dread necromancer from the ancient horror tales gave it power, the mighty form slammed its vile metal hand into the earth of the Morrdunn. A booming peal of thunder split the heavens and the green light in Nagash’s eyes blazed with in
credible power, flowing through his withered, monstrous body to pour into the earth of the Empire like a corruption.
Flickering green light danced over Markus’s son’s body, like wisps of corpse light in the swamps. Though he was cold and dead, Vartan sat up with stiff movements, as some dread force other than his own wasted muscles empowered him. Markus wept at this violation of his son’s flesh, hating these beings of darkness more than he had hated anything in his life.
Vartan turned his dead gaze upon Markus, the cold empty green light flickering in his sunken, shrivelled eyes. Cold horror crept over Markus as his son stood on limbs he himself had washed and oiled the night before, the metal links of Vartan’s armour clinking together as he took his place at the blood drinker’s side.
The ground of the hill trembled and a deep groaning from its heart rumbled far beneath Markus’s feet. The grass rippled, as though an army of snakes writhed beneath its surface, and a hand punched up through the earth. Dried flesh clung to the bones and fragments of rusted armour emerged as the dead warrior clawed its way from beneath the hill.
More and more followed it, hundreds of Menogoth dead torn from their eternal rest by the dark sorcery of the ancient necromancer. The hill shook as the honoured slain broke open their mausolea, tombs and barrows and marched to the summit of the Morrdunn.
Markus felt his anger crowd out his fear, but Khaled al-Muntasir’s grip was unbreakable.
‘Know that your Emperor’s realm is doomed,’ said the blood drinker. ‘Know that all you love will die and rise again to serve this army of darkness. Know this and despair!’
Khaled al-Muntasir’s fangs sank into his neck and Markus felt his life being sucked from his flesh. Yet as he slipped down into the black abyss of death, his thoughts were that once again the Menogoths had failed their Emperor.
Five
Homecomings
Another arrow thudded home in the straw man hung from the pole, spinning him around with a foot of Asoborn wood protruding from his chest. Wolfgart watched as the black and gold chariot rumbled a weaving course through a long line of stakes hammered in the dry ground. Maedbh guided the two horses pulling the chariot with an expert hand, while his daughter loosed carefully aimed arrows from the fighting platform behind her.